Human Impact

Who is most impacted by natural disasters?According to Live Science, Earth might seem like a more active and dangerous place than ever, given the constant media reports of multiple natural disasters recently. But a broader view reveals that it's not Mother Nature who's changed, but we humans.

People have built more towns, cities, even man-made islands all over the world than ever before. Natural disasters aren't happening more or even getting bigger---we are getting more in the way. People are being killed by the thousands because we are building our homes on in places that are located in major natural disaster hotspots.

How are natural disasters becoming "unnatural" disasters?On the website for the Institute of Development Studies, research fellow Terry Cannon states that, "There's no such thing as a natural disaster." He then explained that from the mid 1970's onwards there was a paradigm shift away from the idea of ‘natural disasters', to the belief that all disasters are socially constructed. In 1976 in the Nature journal, academics argued that disasters were caused by socio-economic factors rather than natural factors.

Terry used the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010 as an example to demonstrate the concept that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. He referred to an article on theLaw and Disorder blog, which highlighted how the misery and suffering of the Haitian people was caused by the fragile economic situation and poor governance rather than the hurricane itself.

What is social construction of a disaster?The idea of the socially constructed disaster was more recently explored in a World Bank publication in 2010, Natural Hazards, Unnatural Disasters. Terry highlighted the need to understand people's levels of vulnerability in order to fully explain disasters, rather than relying on a physical explanation alone.He explained that certain social systems can cause people to live in dangerous places or make risky decisions. For example, people will choose to live somewhere because of the potential for them to make a living or because they simply do not have the political or economic power to make a different choice. Terry used the communities who live on precarious cliff sides in La Paz, Bolivia as an example of how communities make decisions based on their assessment of the risk and their ability to cope with the inherent dangers.